“Okay,” I said. We doubted the zither man was alive. Given how Em and I had met, and the surrounding events of my mother’s wedding, how could Em and I get married without an Austrian zither-meister? Em imagined the old Austrian with kids and grandkids, only because she remembered his name for me. Son of the Bride, the edelweiss man had called me. Em searched the phone books for Manhattan and Brooklyn. There were businesses beginning with Son of, and Daughter of, but no musicians—not a Son of Zither Man or a Daughter of Zither-Meister, as Em imagined. We searched together for “The Third Man Theme” or “The Harry Lime Theme,” and for just plain zither players. There was no one.

“You can find anyone you’re looking for in New York, Adam,” Uncle Martin once told me. Em had an idea.

“How do you say The Third Man in German?” Em asked me.

“Der dritte Mann, and Anything Else on a Zither.” This was what Em found in the Brooklyn phone book—this was what an unnamed zither player was promising. Even Elvis?

There was no trace of an Austrian accent in the recorded message Em and I listened to; the voice on the zither player’s answering machine was all Brooklyn. He sounded like an emotionally disturbed high school student, the kind of kid who eventually commits a violent crime—he shoots his teacher, or all the girls in his class.

“I do private parties, but nothin’ religious. I’ll do a weddin’—the more secula, the betta,” the zither kid began. “I gotta big repertoire, for a zitha—no band, just a zitha. If you don’t know what a zitha is, you betta call somebody else,” the zither kid concluded. In the background, we could hear “The Harry Lime Theme”—the familiar strings, plucking away. I will hear this song forever, whether that’s a good thing or not. Em and I couldn’t speak. The Brooklyn boy’s vernacular was unexpected, but the emotional wallop of “The Third Man Theme” surprised us more.

The boy in Brooklyn would turn out to be the grandson of the old Austrian zither-meister. When Em and I had recovered sufficiently to meet him, he told us his grandfather never stopped talking about a wedding in New Hampshire, where an old man in diapers was killed by lightning. “My grandfather—it was my mom’s wedding,” I told the zither kid. We met the boy in a coffeehouse of his choice on the Lower East Side; the walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge. The kid brought his zither, though we never said we were auditioning him.

“Son of the Bride,” the zither grandkid said, almost reverentially. “I hear there was orgasms goin’ on—long-lastin’ ones, all weekend,” the zither man’s grandson told us, in hushed tones. “My grandfather neva got ova the orgasm girl.”